Jazzy D's Soul Notes

Susan Sontag "On Photography" (Penguin Books)




Susan Sontag's original essays on the meaning of photography and the photographic image are challenging. She presents a wide range of ideas and discusses the work of some of the great photographers of the past century. Whether you agree with her views about the aggressive nature of photography or the essential "nonintervention" of the act of taking a picture, you can savour the intelligent arguments that she presents.

These essays are six meditations on the nature and implications of photography. Each essay pivots engagingly around a provocative theme: the “aesthetic consumerism” exemplified by taking and collecting photographs, the inherent surrealism of photographs, the incurable defensiveness of those who claim photography an art form, photography’s project of beautifying the world, the West as a “culture based on images”.


I was disappointed that there were no pictorial examples of the multitude of references made by Sontag. The book was nevertheless an excellent and invigorating read.

Joan Didion "Slouching Towards Bethlehem : Essays" (Farrar,Straus and Giroux)




Another paperback passed on from my brother. He must have had a small collection of her writings as this is the third dispatch from him. Whatever his reasons and i guess that one of them is that i am fascinated by the sixties,its history and culture as well as the radical movements that were established in the period. Also,some of the best new music and jazz came in the sixties.

So, there was a certain time in America, or the world, when the zeitgeist was slightly ahead of its time, when no one was really aware of what was happening until long after it had already happened. At such a time, fiction takes a backseat to journalism, especially sardonic, closely observed journalism, the kind that is both all about the voice of the journalist but which, once that voice is locked down, suddenly becomes all about whatever that voice is talking about.

In the mid-sixties, Joan Didion definitely had one of those voices. Whether she was writing about John Wayne, or Comrade Laski, or the waifs fluttering through San Francisco who know nothing and are desperate to keep it that way with meth or acid or pot or whatever — Joan Didion described America to itself. For good or bad.

What i love about these essays is that she writes in such a wonderfully precise way. Her prose takes your breath away with it’s descriptive beauty. Regardless of the subject matter, it's so easy to get lost in her words. She tells each person's story without condemning or praising their belief system.

Perhaps the best collection of essays in her ouvre that i have read.

Started dipping into the A.C.Grayling book "The Heart Of Things" that my bro gave me last time i was in Brighton. It is one that you dip anywhere, so perversely, i started near the back with the two potted biogs of Bernard Williams and Edward Said. Then went to one of the sections near the beginning of the book on "Reading".

Currently listening to a mix of music i might do for my next gig.